EVOLUTION IS A FAITH -

EVOLUTION IS A FAITH - PART 2

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February 25, 1997 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is part 2 of two parts of a message which was delivered by Dr. Henry Morris at the 1995 Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology, Metropolitan Tabernacle (Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SD, England). This is reprinted from the Sword & Trowel, 1996 No. 4, copyright 1996 --

THE BIG BANG

One of the classic examples now receiving a great deal of attention in the news media is the history of the universe as interpreted through the Big Bang theory. This theory is now the standard explanation for the origin of the universe. Evolutionists are not quite sure whether it was ten billion years ago, or eight or fifteen or twenty billion years ago. Give or take a few billion years, somewhere back in time this Big Bang took place.

You must appreciate that the Big Bang was not a sudden explosion in the corner of the universe. The universe was in the bang. There was an infinitesimal particle of space-time (not just a particle in space and time) that exploded. Explosions usually create disorder, and so in this case you would expect a universal explosion to produce universal disorder. However, the Big Bang theory says that out of this chaotic explosion evolved the universe -- the galaxies, the planets and the animals and people.

Although the Big Bang theory is widely accepted as the origin of the universe, there are a number of very competent astrophysicists who reject it, and for very good reasons. The best known is the British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle. He was the originator of the Steady State theory. He also examined the Big Bang theory -- in fact, he named it. Professor Hoyle says that there is a sickly pall now hanging over the Big Bang theory. So many fallacies surround it, and so many problems, that sooner or later it will die, and a new theory will have to be developed to take its place.

Several other theories have been proposed for the origin of the universe, but the problem remains that no one has ever observed a star or galaxy or planet evolve.

These possibilities exist only in mathematical theory.

All kinds of things can be done with mathematics and computer simulations these days, but as far as laboratory experimentation or observation in nature is concerned, there is no evidence.

I certainly believe the Big Bang theory is on its way out. There is plenty of documentation from leading astronomers such as Halston Alp, Geoffrey Burdige, Jayant Narlikar, Nandra Wickramasinghe, and many others, who now reject the theory. However, they still believe that the universe evolved in some way, and they struggle to find an alternative theory. They do not acknowledge the impossibility of a universe of complex structure evolving by chance.

As long as people have been looking at the stars they have looked exactly as they do today. The only change we have seen in the heavens is deterioration. We have seen stars explode and disintegrate. We have seen meteorites break up. These are downhill changes in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. No one has ever seen anything evolve into something more complex in the entire history of astronomy or biology.

"BORN IN VIOLENCE"

A recent edition of Scientific American was devoted to evolution. One of the authors, Dr. Robert Kirschner, wrote that matter in the universe was born in violence. Hydrogen and helium emerged from the intense heat of the Big Bang. According to this idea the first stars were just hydrogen and helium stars. There are no such stars now. No one has ever been able to find a star of this kind. But the first stars had to be of this kind in order to emerge out of the Big Bang.

The theory says that from the interior heat of such stars, higher elements evolved. More elaborate atoms of carbon, oxygen, calcium and iron (out of which we are made) had their origins in the burning depths of those proto-stars. The astronomer Hugh Ross says that we are just the ashes of the primeval explosion.

What about heavier elements like uranium? Kirschner goes on to say, "Heavy elements such as uranium were synthesised in the shock waves of supernova explosions." So the heavy elements cannot be generated within the stars. The gigantic explosion of a star is necessary to develop them. Then, atoms generated in these violent explosions of disorder somehow come together to form the solar system.

I do not have scope to deal with the many difficulties of the Big Bang theory. Evolutionists try to overcome these difficulties by developing sub-theories. A new one comes out, it seems to me, every week or so.

AMAZING MIRACLES

One of these describes the duration of the Big Bang (the "inflationary theory"). The idea is that in order for the bang to work, a very rapid period of expansion is needed. In ten to the minus thirty-five seconds, an incredibly small fraction of a second, the universe (the primeval particle of space-time) inflated to the size of a grapefruit, and then the Big Bang took place.

Dr. Edward Tryon, Professor of Physics at Hunter College, University of New York, says that in this scenario, the "hot big bang" was preceded by a "cold big whoosh." He is the originator of this idea. Others have taken it up. In 1973 he even proposed that our universe had been created spontaneously from nothing, ex nihilo! (People used to criticise the church for teaching creation out of nothing. Yet evolutionists are now talking about creation ex nihilo!) The universe evolved out of nothing, for no reason. It just suddenly happened!

Dr. Tryon has said, "I conjecture that our universe had its physical origin as a quantum fluctuation of some pre-existing vacuum, or state of nothingness."

I am not inventing this to make evolutionists look ridiculous. This really is what they are teaching. Let me quote from Dr. Harold Puthoff:

"Edward Tryon, at the City University of New York, proposed that our universe may have originated as a fluctuation of the vacuum on a large scale as 'simply one of those things that happens from time to time'."

It should be sufficient to say that there is no evidence for anything like that in scientific observation. One of the latest ideas is that we have not just one universe, but a whole series of bubbly universes. Each one bubbles off another one, and that in turn bubbles off others, so that there are all kinds of universes out there. Each of these, in the "inflation period", instead of just expanding to the size of a grapefruit, goes to a size several times the size of the universe in just a fraction of a second. That certainly requires some faith to believe!

We could go on to speak of the solar system. There are eight planets and about 60 satellites, all of which are completely different. They could not possibly have evolved out of some primeval dust powder. Evolutionists theorise about catastrophe, chaos, colliding asteroids and planetessimals bumping this way and that way. All these catastrophes in the past are said to cause the vast diversity. But it is sheer speculation. No such processes can be observed in action.

Another fascinating issue is that of the Earth and its geological ages. Even though we do not know all about the universe, evolutionists do claim to know about these geological ages of 4.6 billion years of Earth's history. Over these 4.6 billion years we have emerging (they say) the primeval one-cell animals, then the many-celled invertebrates, then the vertebrates, and finally human beings.

Charles Darwin was indebted to Charles Lyell, saying that he could never have developed his theory without Lyell showing that the Earth was extremely old. The geological ages were worked out by Lyell, Roderick Murchison, Adam Sedgwick and others, in England in the nineteenth century.

Did these geological ages really occur? Remember that history and written records go back only a few thousand years. So how do we get beyond that into millions and billions of years of Earth's history? How do we know the geological ages existed? If we find a fossil or some rocks, how do we know in which age they were laid down?

CIRCULAR REASONING

Well, here is how you know. This quotation is from the Worldbook Encyclopaedia. It tells how they calculate the age of the rocks. "Palaeontology, the study of fossils, is important in the study of geology. The age of the rocks maybe determined by the fossils found in them." So the rock is dated by the fossils found in it.

This is all very well if you know the age of the fossils. How do you know that? The article on fossils in the same encyclopaedia gives you the answer. (It is by the same author, a professor at the University of Califomia.) "Scientists determine when the fossils were formed by finding out the age of the rocks in which they lie." In other words, you cannot really tell the geological age.

If you cannot really distinguish one age from another, these fossils could perhaps all be the same age, could they not? And if they are all the same age, that means they did not take millions of years, but were formed at one time, or within one period.

Another, newer, ingredient of evolutionary theory is the phenomenon of neo-catastrophism. Geologists, who for so long advocated uniformitarianism (slow processes over millions of years), are now turning to catastrophism. One of the leaders in this movement was Dr. Derek Ager of University College, Swansea. In his book, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, he says that catastrophes such as hurricanes and floods do more in an hour or day than the ordinary processes of nature can achieve in a thousand years. This is moving back to the biblical concept of creation. God can do in one day what evolutionists imagine should take many thousands of years.

RETURN TO CATASTROPHE

Ager's last book, written just before he died, was called "The New Catastrophism." The reviewer of that book said that catastrophism had now arrived as the status quo in geology. Evolutionists, then, are returning to catastrophism, but not, however, to the Flood of the Bible. They still maintain that these catastrophes took place at different times, over long ages. In the very last paragraph of his book, Ager says, "The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom, and short periods of terror."

Everything we see in the geological record indicates catastrophe. Since every unit was formed by a catastrophe, as Dr. Ager and many others are saying, the entire series was formed by a world-wide complex of catastrophes.

However, there is no evidence of a world-wide time gap in the geological strata; no world-wide unconformity as they call it. The process of sedimentation and deposition continued uniformly from the bottom of the geological column to the top without a time break. It occurred, without doubt, as a single catastrophe.

[Part 2 of 2. Taken from an address entitled "The Current State of the Evolutionary Faith," given by Dr. Henry Morris at the 1995 Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, England.]

Part 1 of this article is at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/evolufaith1.htm